Local Muslim leader stresses religious celebration has no connection to 9/11

Local Muslim leader Ahmed Noor has a message for people who will see a large gathering of Muslims next Monday morning: “We are by no means celebrating the very horrific activities of 9/11.”

The Mosque and Islamic Center of Hampton Roads will host roughly 3,000 Muslims at the Boo Williams Sportsplex for a religious celebration that will fall on Sept. 12 this year because of the relationship between the calendar used in Islam and the commonly used Gregorian calendar.

The traditional Islamic calendar is lunar, charting the passage of time by revolutions of the moon around the earth. The Gregorian calendar most of us use is a solar calendar which starts a new year after a full revolution of the earth around the sun.

A year in the Islamic calendar is about 11 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar, which means the Gregorian dates for holidays tied to a specific date on the Islamic calendar shift a little every year in relation.

An annual event called the Feast of Sacrifice marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, called the hajj. The feast honors the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command before God intervened to stop the sacrifice — a story that Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism.

This year, that holiday will fall on Sept. 12, the morning after the 15th anniversary of the attacks on America masterminded by Osama bin Laden.

Noor said he wants to stress to the community that this celebration is in no way associated with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“We condemn them in the strongest possible terms,” Noor said.

Noor said that the actions and beliefs of the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001 — actions that resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and were catalysts for foreign wars that followed — were so far afield from Islamic doctrine that Noor doesn’t believe they should even be called Muslims.